Bright Angels and Familiars anthologizes the full sweep of contemporary Mormon short fiction. Beginning with Virginia Sorensen and Maurine Whipple, the best of Mormondom's "lost generation" of the 1940s and 1950s, it progresses to Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall, the first in a new generation of the 1970s and 1980s to produce complete collections of short stories, and Lewis Horne adn Levi Peterson, the first to be nationally published and honored. It concludes with such recent and increasingly prominent writers as Phyllis Barber, John Bennion, Orson Scott Card, Neal Chandler, Judith Freeman, Walter Kirn, and Margaret Young.
These writers employ a wide spectrum of styles and themes, from realism to post-modernism, from folklore to satire, from faith to despair. Editor Eugene England has selected what he feels are the best short stories of today's finest Mormon writers, making Bright Angels & Familiars a definitive compilation. [from back cover]